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Trailblazing transgender golfer from Canada vies for place in LPGA tour — at 62

Robert Lancaster was a top-notch Canadian golfer 40 years ago, leading Hamilton’s McMaster University to two Ontario championships in the early 1970s. Dr. Lancaster moved to Arizona in the early 1990s and had gender-reassignment surgery in 2010.

Robert Lancaster was a top-notch Canadian golfer 40 years ago, leading Hamilton’s McMaster University to two Ontario championships in the early 1970s and playing as a talented amateur in tournaments alongside such national icons as George Knudson and Moe Norman.

Then a busy career in medicine, a marriage and raising three children pushed golf to the fringe of his life. It wasn’t until Dr. Lancaster had moved to Arizona in the early 1990s, divorced his first wife, weathered a bankruptcy, married his second wife and — after a suicidal psychological meltdown — had gender-reassignment surgery in April 2010 that a woman named “Bobbi” Lancaster decided to take another shot at life as a professional golfer.

Now, at age 62, the former men’s champion at the tony Hamilton Golf and Country Club is making waves in women’s golf in the U.S. southwest, where Lancaster is striving to become the first transgender woman to compete in the LPGA.

“I had a great game and a lot of length and a lot of talent,” said the dual Canadian-American citizen, recalling her days as one of Ontario’s top young male golfers. “But you have to have a great mind to play at the highest of levels. And I lacked confidence, for many reasons” — chiefly, Lancaster told Postmedia News, the lifelong struggle to resolve her sexual identity.

“That held me back, there’s no question,” she said from her home in Gold Canyon, Ariz., just east of Phoenix. “Not just in golf, but in every aspect of my life.”

It was a life that nearly ended twice in recent years, first when a deeply depressed Lancaster — before her sex-change surgery — came close to suicide, and then again after suffering a stroke during a trip home to visit family in Canada.

“I’m not spiritual at all, or religious,” she said. “But it’s a miracle I survived the suicide stuff, let alone the stroke.

“If I needed any more motivation, that was it,” Lancaster continued. “I said to myself, I’m not going to put off getting myself right any longer. That’s when I started to see counsellors and get on hormones.”

Remarkably, Lancaster’s marriage to his second wife, Lucy, would survive the gender transformation. A nurse practitioner who married Lancaster in 1999, she had rescued her partner from a planned self-inflicted death after discovering a cache of letters to friends and family — including one addressed to herself — that Lancaster had written in the days before the planned suicide attempt.

“I was hell and bent on doing myself in,” Lancaster recalled. “The world and my kids and my ex-wife and my current wife – everybody, I thought, would be better off if I could just get removed from this situation. I knew how I would do it and I planned it all out, because I’m extremely organized. I had all my letters written. And that all got interrupted by Lucy snooping around.”

After pulling out of the “vortex of depression” and recovering from the stroke that followed, Lancaster finally decided to outwardly become the woman she felt she’d always been inside.

“The gender issue was always there, since I was little,” said Lancaster, who was born in Chatham, Ont., in 1950 and grew up in nearby Ridgetown and later Hamilton.

But understandably, the decision to go through with sexual reassignment put a severe strain on Lancaster’s second marriage.

“That’s when it got really bad for Lucy — like, ‘You’re not really going to do this, are you?’ she would say. ‘You’re not really going to transition to another gender?’ But that’s the way it all went. And we had some rough times, but we are together. I have to pinch myself, sometimes. We’re having a great life.”

And now, while still maintaining her practice as a Phoenix-area family physician, Lancaster has made golf — and a quest to qualify for the best professional women’s tour in the world — a top priority in her life.

Lancaster played in and won a senior women’s tournament in the months following her surgery. But her performance prompted muttering among some opponents and left Lancaster — who tops six feet in height and spent six decades exposed to male hormones — feeling she shouldn’t be competing at that level.

“If I played against your average 60-year-old woman, it wouldn’t be fair — I’m still too strong… I’m hitting it 60, 70, 80, 90 yards past them.” she said. “Even though the (female) hormones have knocked me down – and they have knocked me down, because I don’t have the same muscle mass or strength – I’ve still got too much game, too much strength. I can still overpower a 61-year-old woman. And I don’t get any jollies out of doing that.”

Instead, this year Lancaster has joined the Arizona-based Cactus Tour, a stepping-stone series of tournaments for professional female golfers — most of them in their 20s or 30s — aiming to make it one day to the LPGA.

Last week, after missing several tournaments to help tend her ailing mother in Canada, Lancaster struggled to a 25th-place finish at a Cactus Tour event in Phoenix.

But Lancaster says she’s “competitive with that age group. I don’t feel I have any advantage. I’m fairly comfortable playing with them and they’ve embraced me.”

Later this year, she says, she plans to enroll in the LPGA qualifying school and — if her Cactus Tour performances and other tournament scores hold up — eventually vie for a spot on the LPGA tour.

It’s a bid made possible by another trailblazing, transgender golfer —2008 world women’s long-drive champion Lana Lawless — who launched a lawsuit in October 2010 to force the Ladies Professional Golf Association to open its tour to women who, like her, had completed a male-to-female transition.

Before the case went to court, though, the LPGA’s membership voted to join other sports bodies — including the International Olympic Committee and U.S. colleges under the NCAA — in eliminating the “female at birth” clause from its constitution.

In May 2011, lawyers for Lawless and the LPGA announced that the lawsuit had been resolved, with the association expressing “its appreciation to Lana Lawless for raising the issue of transgender participation in its tournaments” and applauding its own members “who voted overwhelmingly to remove the ‘female at birth’ provision from its bylaws.”

Lancaster said earning a spot on the LPGA tour — four decades after winning varsity tournaments as a young man in Canada — would be a “dream” achievement for a woman in her 60s.

“I sometimes feel like I’m still young in my head, I’ve got it still. Then there’s other days, I’m beat up, I’m sore, I’ve had to take Advil, my arthritis — you know,” she said. “But they’ve got the policy. And if there are going to be bumps, I’m kind of doing this for the 23-year old who’s going to be coming behind me, who’s got way more youth and fitness. I’m still going to try my damnedest. But if I smooth the waters for somebody behind me, then that’s what’s in it for me, too.”